The Conflict Within

Raising kids is fun…usually…there are however moments where I could use any number of other words to describe it, such as:
Challenging
Hard
Exciting
Rewarding
Rarely, does the word “easy” come to mind. And that’s ok…we didn’t become parents because we thought it would be easy.

One of the more difficult parts of parenting is dealing with conflict. The battle over the ball is just the beginning.

Last week, our rule abiding child got in his first fight at school. Leigh-Ann’s first question was, “What happened?” And this should come as no surprise, the first question that I had was, “did you win?” I have more secrets to great parenting…feel free to ask me some time :).

The story is that he was in line and the child in front of him turned around and kicked him. So Dallas kicked him back. And then it went back and forth.

When I asked if Dallas won, he said, “he got me real hard.” I said, “so then what?”Dallas said, “I chased him and chased him. Then our teacher asked what was happening so we told her and then we just got back to class.”

Now if this was a fight between girls it could last through high school…but for now the boys are good friends again.

At the risk of sounding like a violent family, last week two of the boys were wrestling while at their nephews football game. Don’t ask….

One of them came to me in the bleachers and said, “Z punched me in the neck.”

Why?

We were wrestling and he got mad. I could bore you with another great bit of parenting wisdom, but I won’t…this time.

Conflict is something we each experience on a regular basis. Cain, the first sibling in the history of the world murdered his brother Abel.